Naval Ravikant

Where you choose to live is crazy important. It determines who you're going to spend time with, the colleagues, lovers and friends. It determines whether you are going to spend more time earning, your health, how much you exercise, what you eat ...etc. It will determine and shape your values. Where you choose to live is an insanely important decision that has huge repercussions on so many things in life.

The notion of how to save the world is different for everone.

One person might want to fight carbon emissions by reducing number of cars. Meanwhile, the other person will want to enable efficient agriculture, by increasing supply of the farm machinery in the short term. Both will be saving the world, while fighting each other.

Everyone thinks they're a good person. Everyone's fighting for somebody else, for a cause or religion or a person or a family member or a legacy or a loved one or something.

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

Instead of fighting, build your own garden, clear your own mind, and attend to your own household before you go out and try and fix

Your only power in life is to inspire other people, and the only way you could inspire them is by living the most genuine and authentic life to yourself possible.

Legacy is what people that don't know you will think about you, after you are dead.

Do your best work, and do it for yourself and nobody else, that's all that matters.

Pick self-improvement path that is easiest for you to follow, something that you love. It will be easier for you to do without feeling guilty. Do more of that. It's simple.

Whatever feels like "work" is going to make you unhappy, so find things that feel like hobbies, something you actually enjoy, and figure out how to have those things work for you.

A lot of your own unhappiness is driven by your self image, and what you do to preserve it.

Realize that you have this self image of yourself, how you see yourself in your mind's eye when you think of yourself, honest or dependable, capable or not, quiet or funny or whatever it.

That image is what you are trying to live up to, and that image is also what allows society to hold you hostage because if you're not living up to your self image, that's a leash around your neck.

Nothing that you chase will ever make you happy.

You may think that by getting to a certain outcome or a milestone will make you happy, but when you get there, you will get a short-term boost, and then go back to being unhappy.

To be happy, you have to be happy with self.

If you think for yourself, you should be able to figure everything out for yourself from what the "first principles." When you don't know something, you should be able to admit it honestly, rather than rely upon authorities to give you the answer.

Wisdom is understanding long term consequences of your actions.

Whether that's in sports or medicine or life or love or investing or technology or business, if you understand the long term consequence of your actions and you behave for a good long term outcome, then you will naturally appear wise because you would be forward-looking.

Probably not. Naval has been spending time working on himself, and although he's made a special exception to appear on this podcast as a way to help out a brand-new podcaster, and part of the New Zealand fellowship program, it is unlikely he is going to be doing any more of these in the near future.

If you want to hear more of Naval, he's got his own podcast, linked below.

Naval Ravikant, on Happiness Is Peace in Motion, defined stress as one thing pulled two ways. A person is stressed when two wants cannot both be true: rest and finish the work, or the party and the office. Give one up, or accept that it is out of your control, and the strain drops. The mind adds strain on its own. Say not to picture a white elephant, and you picture it. His line is that peace is happiness at rest and happiness is peace in motion. The aim is peace, and more activity will not produce it. Understanding will. He tied that to the old phrase that the name of God is truth.

Naval Ravikant says money solves money problems and buys freedom in the material world. On A Calm Mind, a Fit Body, a House Full of Love, he gives the purpose in one line, confirming a sentence of his own that is read back to him. The point of money is that you do not have to be in a specific place, at a specific time, doing anything you do not want to do. He sets that next to the harder claim from the same talk. A calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love still cannot be bought, however much freedom the money purchases.

Naval Ravikant names a calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love, and calls that his favorite tweet. They cannot be bought. They have to be earned. Jeff Bezos, he says, still has to exercise, still has to work on his closest relationship, and still does not get his inner state from anything outside him. Ravikant treats the three as health, mental health, and the people closest to you, and says they bring more peace than money does. He had a practical tweetstorm drafted on how to get there and was holding it, because advice in the middle gets attacked from both sides.

Matt tells Stewart Alsop, on Crazy Wisdom, that podcasting is still young and growing. The trend he notices is shorter shows, and a move toward clips. Naval Ravikant was releasing short audio clips from a longer conversation. Listeners and hosts were also posting a short clip on Twitter to pull people into the full episode. Matt says a show can be released as clips, and that Overcast had just added a way to chop out a segment and send it to a friend. He had also heard strong shows that ran only five minutes, or ten to twelve. His summary is clips, and shorter podcasts overall.

Asked for a favorite, Matt of Podcast Notes names Brandon Stanton, founder of Humans of New York, on The Tim Ferriss Show. Stanton was number two on Matt's own top-ten list for 2018, but Matt now calls that story number one and says everyone should hear it. He also singles out Dr. Matthew Walker's first appearance on Joe Rogan, about why sleep matters, as a podcast of the year. He adds Naval Ravikant's Periscope sessions, especially a June talk through the How to Get Rich tweetstorm, and another just before Ravikant started a short podcast series. Matt warns that some of the glow is just recency, because the latest thing you heard feels bigger than it is.

On Naval's episode Give Society What It Doesn't Know How to Get, Naval Ravikant says you will not get rich renting out your time. Society pays you for creating something it wants but does not yet know how to make, then delivering it at scale. He points to oil for John D. Rockefeller, cars for Henry Ford, and the pocket computer Steve Jobs and Apple put in people's hands. Quoting Alan Kay, he says technology is whatever does not quite work yet. The job is to create that thing and scale it until it pays for itself. Uber, in his telling, took the chauffeur from the rich and made a private driver ordinary.

On Reject Most Advice, Naval Ravikant says the dangerous part of taking advice is that the person who gave it will not be around to tell you when it no longer applies. He uses advice differently. For him it is a set of anecdotes and maxims he can recall when his own experience finally matches, and then say, that is what that person meant. About 90 percent of his tweets, he says, are maxims he wrote for himself, small hooks such as: if you cannot see yourself working with someone for life, do not work with them for a day. Without the underlying experience, those lines are just quotes. With it, they are pointers back to principles he already lived.

On Accountability Means Letting People Hate on You, Naval Ravikant rejects the idea that wealth creation is at odds with an environmentally safe planet. He calls the zero-sum version of that story false, and says Elon Musk is not playing a zero-sum game with the environment. The word he borrows from environmentalists is sustainability. A for-profit business is at least financially sustainable, and a B Corp can carry a dual mission. Many nonprofit efforts, he says, would be better as companies, because they would not have to beg for grants. Some founders reach a philanthropic aim by running the business and then deciding what to do with the winnings.

On Accountability Means Letting People Hate on You, Naval Ravikant says people misunderstand accountability. They think it means you count as accountable only after you succeed. He says it means sticking your neck out, failing in public with your name on the work, and letting people hate on you. He is less active on Twitter because every tweet draws nitpickers, and he says you have to learn to ignore them. He also says you do not have to quit a 9-to-5. Accountability, leverage, and specific knowledge can start inside the career you already have.

Smash Notes for the first week of April 2019

- Justin Kan tells the story of how he nearly drowned in the Pacific Ocean while spearfishing with his wife. - Chamath Paliphapitiya tells Kara Swisher that he is not anyone's slave - Austen Allred of Y Combinator shares a story of how he turned a failed startup blog into a huge success - Naval Ravikant explains the difference between money, wealth and social status - DHH, the founder of Ruby on Rails, Basecamp, and the author of "Rework" and "It does not have to be crazy at work" explains why years after becoming a millionaire he still shows up for work every day - Tim Romero from Disrupting Japan explains to fellow podcasters what makes a grea